Yo-Yo Ma awes with warm-hearted, joyous playing

Perhaps only an artist of the charisma and celebrity stature of Yo-Yo Ma could awe a packed Esplanade audience into two evenings of reverential silence before drawing from them standing ovations of the kind typically reserved for pop idols. But these two evenings overflowed with the kind of joyous, warmhearted music-making that has kept Ma at the forefront of classical music for almost half a century.

- Geoffrey Lim

Ma, who turns 70 in October, no longer plays with the earnest, well-oiled perfectionism of his youth. He is now at once a more thoughtful and less cautious artist, and one could hear a lifetime of maturation in the disparity between the chiselled suavity of his first Bach recording and the altogether more vulnerable, human musician on display in his performances of the odd-numbered suites on Sept 24.

His generous, fundamentally gentle view of these sublime but difficult works expressed itself in the smallest touches: the playful breathlessness of the falling arpeggios in the C major suite’s courante, the swaggering accents of the same suite’s gigue, the delicate hesitation before the first B flat of the G major suite’s second minuet emerged after the geniality of the first minuet.

His C minor suite, melancholy and as exquisitely shaded as a Paul Klee painting, had little of the darkness of a Pablo Casals or the imperious elegance of a Pierre Fournier. Yet it felt as searching as either cellist, finding a touching fragility in the austere chromaticism of the sarabande that forms the core of the work.

Though Ma’s bow arm may no longer yield the same voluptuous weight of sonority, in all other mat-

ters his command remains undiminished, with immaculate dynamic control, preternatural precision of intonation and tonal nuance that made the 1,700-seat Esplanade Concert Hall seem as intimate as a lady chapel.